IT WAS the Christmas Eve of 1811, a night beautiful, bright and clear. The moon was high in the heavens, and a myriad stars gemmed the sky. Flakes of snow fell gently, like the lighting of grasshoppers, but not so thick as to cloud the air. It was cold, but not bitterly cold. The snow crunched cheerfully under your feet, the hedges were rather frosted than cumbered; but the wild waste of hill all around and above Slaithwaite was white with a coverlet smoothed as with careful hands. The little homesteads on the hillsides stood out stark and black on the pale setting, their slender lights of lamp or candle declaring that many this night waked, who every other night in the year went to bed with the sun. We sat in the house, kitchen you would call it now--all our household save only 'Siah, who, we made no doubt, was faithful to his yearly custom of honouring Christmas by getting more ale than was good for him. Only a candle burned on the table, but the fire was piled high, and cast a lurid light about the room, the yule log saved from last year's fire blazing bravely. My father was fidgeting and looking at the clock. He would have rather been in bed. We had had our supper, but a great currant loaf and a round of cheese was on the table, and the biggest pitcher of all our ware was ready for Martha to fill from the barrel in the cellar, when the right moment should come. Mother and Mary had speculated, and wondered and then wondered again as to whether the Church singers would this year sing a verse or two by our door. My mother argued they would not, as a mark of reprobation for our joining the Baptists. Mary, who knew that the hearts of the young men of a choir, church or chapel, are not in the keeping of vicar or minister, had her own reasons for maintaining a contrary view. My father stoutly declared he did not care a brass farthing one way or another. Meat and drink and five good shillings were waiting them, he said, and if they were fools enough to turn up their noses at good victuals and good brass, that was their look out, not his. All the same we all knew he would have felt it keenly that our house should be passed over for the first time within the memory of any of us. Then came the further problem--which set would be likely to reach us first, the church, who must sing first at the Vicarage and Dr. Dean's, and at Sammy Sykes's, who was churchwarden; or the waits from Powle Moor, who had further to come and a rougher way. Anyhow we hoped devoutly the two parties would not arrive together. We could hear, in the still night, the sound of music in the air, sad and wistful, floating among the hills. However we should soon be out of doubt, for midnight was hard upon us.